Either someone is pulling a prank on me or I need to debunk an abroad myth. The myth has to do with a topic I haven’t emphasized much in my blog: academics. I’ll be honest: along with the rest of the study abroad population, I expected classes to be cake. Every abroad alumnus I’ve talked to has assured me that abroad classes are notorious for being easy so that you have time to travel and enjoy your surrounding culture. I heard that you might have finals, but don’t expect many papers, and definitely don’t expect to be overloaded with work all at once.
Over the course of the last three months, I’ve observed a number of esoteric idiosyncrasies of Italian social mores: such as, Italians love mojitos, music videos and hot dogs. Perhaps these impressions are slight over-generalizations; but, in whatever way, they seem pervasive enough to consider some-what norms.
When I arrived in Rome, the last thing that I thought I’d be doing was an internship. I thought I’d give the opportunity a chance, however, and I’m quite glad that I did. As I looked through my options at the beginning of the semester, one caught my eye: Ittec SRL. It’s a small firm that performs IT services for a variety of companies, and has a financial forecasting branch, Quantum Forecasting, that uses computer software to predict changing market values. With my Finance major and Computer Science minor, this was clearly a perfect fit, and, after a brief interview, my work began.
“The survival of the fittest is the ageless law of nature, but the fittest are rarely the strong. The fittest are those endowed with the qualifications for adaptation, the ability to accept the inevitable and conform to the unavoidable, to harmonize with existing or changing conditions.”
I found this quote by author Dave E. Smalley to be the most accurate summation of my Study Abroad internship experience, and really, my internship experience as a whole.
I’m a terrible singer. I’ve been told countless times that it would be better if I just didn’t even try. So when I found out that one of my main responsibilities of my internship at the Montessori preschool would be singing in English, I was a bit distressed, to say the least. What if the kids hated my singing? What if I was so bad that they put their hands over their ears? Or worse, hated me and ran away?
People always ask me how the food is here in Chile and everyone expects me to be full of stories of all sorts of exotic foreign delicacies and strange dishes, but this is not at all the case. As a matter of fact, aside from the fact that avocado is consumed at literally every meal, Chile has a pretty nondescript typical diet. That’s not to say that I don’t enjoy the food here or that there aren’t any specifically Chilean foods, but there are very few of these true Chilean foods that are known outside of the southern cone.
Last weekend, I took a trip to Athens and loved it. The city wasn’t the safest place in the world, but the epic history and the beautiful sights were enough to compensate for the sketchy graffiti and the march in the streets. Due to the current economic state of Greece, everything was ridiculously cheap, too. I was sure to stalk up on some nice souvenirs and eat as many giant 2-euro gyros as I could. The only frustrating part of an otherwise ideal weekend was a three-hour delay on our return flight, but a deck of cards and a makeshift backpack-table made the time fly.
